Challenge us to solve your problem in a day

Every six weeks we set aside a day to build something.
It’s how we test ideas quickly, learn what AI can do, and find better ways of working.
We call these Hackathons, and we’ve been running them for the past year.

Now we’d like to hear from you!
Got an idea for a new customer-facing tool?
Something in your organisation that feels slow, repetitive or overdue for a rethink?
Tell us about it – we’ll take a look and see whether it’s something we could prototype.

Group of young professionals in front of a glass screen with metrics and data on it.

Internal AI Day

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon is one day where our team steps away from scheduled work to build something new.

Teams set a single goal for the day and work towards it with no interruptions. The aim is to have something real by the end of the day. It might not be finished and it probably won’t be polished, but you can look at it, use it and make decisions based on it.

That’s where the value sits. A conversation about whether AI could help can easily go round in circles. But a working prototype gives you an immediate understanding of whether you’re on the right track.

We plan these days well in advance and let you know when one is coming. Deadlines and client commitments still get honoured, so you can rest assured that if something urgent comes up, we’ll still be there.

Why we do this

Nurture knowledge & learning

It’s one of our core values. We started running hackathons for ourselves. A full day without scheduled work is the only reliable way to step back and improve how we build things.

Often that means looking hard at tools our team already uses every day. The processes worth improving are usually the ones we run most often, because a small gain on something repeated hundreds of times adds up quickly. A day of focused effort has produced better ways to test code, report on website health, and turn discussions into documentation.

Opening this up to clients makes the day better for us, too. The problems you see are different from the ones we see. They come from a different industry, a different system, and a different set of customers. Working on them takes us somewhere new, and we finish the day knowing more than we did at the start.

We see this as being mutually beneficial. You get a prototype and a clear answer about what’s possible. We get to learn something new that we might never have thought about on our own.

View through glass of a team in a collaborative meeting, with one person presenting to a group seated around a high table in a modern office.

What we’ve built

  • A faster way to load product content.

    A travel company was building product pages by hand, copying content field by field into their CMS. Each product took over an hour, and the finished pages read the same as every competitor using the same supplier feed. We built a prototype that produces a draft page in the client’s own brand voice in about a minute, with the structured data that search engines and AI assistants look for.
  • A children’s charity runs spaces inside hospitals where visitors check in using hardware that’s nearing the end of its life. We prototyped a mobile alternative in a day, and the work has continued with them since.
  • Automated report creation, a tool that writes test coverage for legacy code, a generator for statements of work, AI-assisted design workflows, and automated meeting notes. Less glamorous than the client work, but between them they’ve taken a lot of repetitive effort out of the business.
Two men laughing while greeting each other in an office.

Frame the problem

What makes a good idea

As a human-centred company, the ideas we’re keenest to hear about involve your customers.

  • Something that helps people do a difficult thing. A standalone tool built for a specific group of people who currently find a task hard, slow or inaccessible.
  • A website feature that does more than show information. Agents that answer questions in context, guide a customer through a complicated decision, assemble options into a plan, or support someone getting a quote.
  • Information your customers struggle to find. Most organisations have the answers somewhere. Getting them in front of the right person at the right moment is the hard part.

We also love looking at the work happening behind the scenes: the reports that take days, the task everyone dreads, the process that made sense once and nobody has revisited since.

If you’re unsure whether your idea qualifies, send it anyway. We’d rather hear a half-formed thought than nothing at all.

The process

What happens after you submit

  • We read everything and reply to everyone.
  • We’ll tell you whether we can tackle it, and when. If it fits our model, we’ll come back with a few clarifying questions and aim it at an upcoming hackathon. If several strong ideas arrive at once, we’ll spread them out over multiple sessions, or potentially tackle them independently during downtime.
  • If we can’t run it as it stands, we’ll explain why. Some might need a tool we don’t have a licence for. Some might need access to data or systems that take time to arrange. Some are bigger than one day’s work, and might need a small, low-cost engagement to validate. These are all conversations that are still worth having – often, working out what it would take is more useful than the prototype itself.
Over the shoulder perspective of a Female and Male web developer working on code on their computers.

Submit your idea

Ready to tell us what you think we should work on next? Fill out the form below, telling us about your idea, and we’ll review it for our next Hackathon.